CULTURAL WORKINGS

Welcome to THE CULTURAL WORKER, a blog dedicated to arts of the people ranging from the radical avant garde and free jazz to dissident folk forms and popular arts . The Cultural Worker celebrates revolutionary creativity and features a variety of essays, reviews, fiction, reportage, poetry and musings through the internet pen of this writer, musician and cultural organizer. Scroll straight down and you'll also find an extensive historical Photo Exhibit of cultural workers in action, followed by a series of Radical Arts Links. The features herein will be unabashedly partisan---make no mistake about that. The concept of the cultural worker as a force of fearless creativity, of social change, indeed as an artistic arm of radicalism, has always been left-wing when applied with any degree of honesty at all. No revolutionary act can be truly complete in the absence of art, no progressive campaign can retain its message sans the daring drumbeat of invention, no act of dissent can stand so strong as that which counts the writers, musicians, painters, dancers, actors, photographers, film and performance artists within its ranks. Here's to the history and legacy of cultural work in the throes of the good fight...john pietaro

Monday, December 27, 2010

SOLIDARITY FOREVER: THE IWW AND THE PROTEST SONG

Solidarity Forever: The IWW and the Protest Song

By John Pietaro

Of all US radical organizations, the Industrial Workers of the World is perhaps that which has most fully embraced the notion of the revolutionary cultural worker. Many, many of its early organizers were writers, musicians or visual artists (often all three!) and successfully used the arts as a tool in organizing workers across the globe. The Left’s focus on folk arts as a representation of cultural and national heritage has been a foremost tool in outreach since the turn of the 20th century. This foray into a “culture of the People” became a major point of identification by the proponents of the masses and was the natural outgrowth of the use of songs by workers and others in trying situations. Folk song collectors grew in prominence during the first decades of the 20th century, producing a ‘folk revival’, which, by the 1940s, had blossomed. Ironically, in the United States, the political Left (the Socialist and Communist parties primarily) did not acknowledge the important role of folk arts for decades, though this media was a vastly important historical point of reference. Particularly in the IWW.

Accounts of Wobbly musicians have been recorded as early as 1906, but one year after the IWW’s founding. The Spokane branch was approached by a highly active Socialist Party orator/organizer, Jack Walsh, who developed a plan to aid the Wobblies’ somewhat stunted organizing attempts. Though Walsh was able to draw a considerable crowd in the depressed tenderloin district of the city, he was encountering purposeful disruptions by the missionaries of the Salvation Army and one of their particularly pious brass bands. Not to be outdone by the cacophony, Walsh and the Spokane Wobblies soon had its own powerhouse Industrial Workers Band. Blaring on cornets and marching to the thunderous pulse of drums and tambourines, the Wobbly band were said to have devastated all whom they crossed. The band, clad in black overhauls and red work shirts, left no corner safe for the street evangelicals.

Walsh organized a brass band of his own, in which Mac McClintock played an E-flat baritone horn and a giant lumberjack beat, as McClintock recalled, the “b’jeezuz” out of a bass drum. Walsh’s band learned four tunes and hammered away at these over and over until the evangelists capitulated. (Greenway, John, American Folksongs of Protest. NY: AS Barnes, 1953, page174-175)

The Industrial Workers Band, taking a cue from the popular parodies of the evangelists’ songs, began to perform their own such lampoons of the Religious Right of its day. Among them was “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder”, was well as songs by Harry ‘Mac’ McClintock (1883-1957), already a noted songster in the hobo jungles, and Richard Brazier. Armed with this minimal repertoire and copies of song-lyric leaflets they printed up, the Band embarked on something of a tour of the Pacific Northwest coastal towns.

‘Mack’ McClintock had come to the IWW with an arsenal full of topical original songs including “Halleluiah, I’m a Bum” and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and he helped to popularize many of Joe Hill’s songs including “The Preacher and the Slave”. He traveled the country, organizing for the IWW, spending much of his time in the “hobo jungles” of the period, where he had been a frequent guest since his teenage years. Prior to the IWW, McClintock had worked as a railroad switchman in South Africa and then, according to Wobbly historian Joyce Kornbluh, he

…bummed his way to London to attend the coronation of Edward VII in 1902. He was a civilian mule skinner in the Spanish American War, and had also made his way to China at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. (Kornbluh, Joyce L., editor, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology. NY: Charles H. Kerr, 1998, page 29)

Of course McClintock also had the honor of leading that first IWW marching band, which became a fixture in the Pacific Northwest for several years. McClintock, like others of his generation, remained a Wobbly throughout his life. He began to perform songs of labor and struggle on radio broadcasts in 1925 and he continued to have a show through the mid-1950s. In addition to his IWW membership, McClintock had also joined the American Federation of Musicians Local 6 in California, but he is best known as a songwriter of the IWW.

Ultimately the Industrial Workers Band and the IWW Spokane branch dispensed with its early leader Jack Walsh, whom they saw as a shrewd businessman, largely out for his own profit. But the dye had been cast and the cultural workers among the Wobbly ranks had come to be seen as celebrated by the people and notorious by the powers that be.

…his idea had taken root, and before long street singing and organization became the principal activity of the struggling Pacific locals. The national policy board bestowed its benediction on topical singing as a weapon of revolt, and Walsh’s four-page leaflet grew larger year by year.(Greenway, page 176)

Another important songwriter associated with the IWW was T-Bone Slim (dates unknown, c. 1890-1942), whose actual name was Matti Valentine Huhta. T-Bone served the movement as a highly active Wobbly musician/organizer, though he was a journalist by profession in addition to laboring in other fields over the years. He became affiliated with the IWW by approximately 1910 and quickly began to write for their various periodicals. He also put many of his poems to music, the best known of which was “The Popular Wobbly”, a parody of the then-hit “The Girls Go Wild, Simply Wild Over Me”, which Slim transformed into a sardonic protest song. The Wobblies’ own historical documents call T-Bone Slim one of the most famous and popular of Wob writers, as he penned numerous pamphlets in addition to a number of songs. He would remain an active Wobbly throughout his life.

Starting with 1909, the Wobblies began publishing the Little Red Song Book (“songs to fan the flames of discontent”) which made songs of labor and social change available to all workers.

Richard Brazier was an IWW musician who was part of the committee which produced the first IWW songbook. He described how the music of the Industrial Workers first drew him in:

What first attracted me to the IWW was its songs and the gusto with which its members sang them. Such singing, I thought, was good propaganda, since it had originally attracted me and many others as well; and also useful since it held the crowd for Wobbly speakers who followed. (Brazier, Richard, “The Story of the IWW’s Little Red Song Book”, Labor History number 9, Winter 1968, pp. 91-92; source: Salerno, Salvatore, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World. NY: State University of New York Press, 1989, page 28)

Wobbly historian Salvatore Salerno clarifies:

Cultural expressions such as songs, cartoons and poetry became a critical form and means of communication between the IWW and its members. While IWW worker intellectuals had a major role in disseminating knowledge of the activities, principles and tactics of industrial unionism, worker artists went beyond formal political expressions to create a language and symbolism that made the IWWs principles meaningful within the context of the workers’ cultural and social alienation. (Salerno, Salvatore, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World. NY: State University of New York Press, 1989, pp149-151)

A Wobbly poet/organizer of almost legendary proportions, later an associate of the Socialist Party, was Arturo Giovannitti (1884-1959).This Italian anarchist relocated to the USA in 1901 and became entrenched in the cause of radical labor and developed powerful journalism skills along the route. Giovannitti worked as a coal miner and joined the Italian Socialist Federation of North America and soon his writing skills led him to the post of editor of Italian-language Left periodical Il Proletario. Quickly, Giovannitti joined the IWW and focused his efforts on organizing the textile workers in Lawrence Massachusetts. He and organizer Joseph Ettor led this groundbreaking 1912 strike during which both men were arrested on a bogus murder charge. During their jail term, Giovannitti was encouraged to write about it and he composed the multi-verse book-length Arrows in the Gale,which spoke of the struggle and brandished an introduction by Helen Keller. It included the haunting poems “The Walker” and “The Cage” which told of the sense of eternal hopelessness of the men he encountered in jail. A 1913 article in Current Opinion magazine wrote of Giovannitti and his poetic works:

He has the soul of a great poet, the fervor of a prophet and, added to these, the courage and power of initiative that mark the man of action and the organizer of great crusades…This jail experience of Giovannitti’s has given the world one of the greatest poems ever produced in the English language…‘The Walker’ is more than a poem. It is a great human document (Current Opinion, January 1913; source: Kornbluh, Joyce L., editor, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology. NY: Charles H. Kerr, 1998, page 184)

More so, a piece in Forum magazine of the day stated:

The significant thing is that here we have a new sort of poet with a new sort of song…He and his songs are products of something that few Americans yet understand. We do not comprehend the problem of the unskilled just as we do not comprehend the IWW that has come out of it. A poet has arisen to explain…In ‘the Walker’ he has pointed the prison as no man, not even Wilde, has done. (McGowan, Kenneth, Forum, October 14, 1913; source: ibid)

The charges against Giovannitti and Ettor were overturned on appeal and the pair were freed after five months. Upon release, they’d found that their strike had been a success and the mostly Italian immigrant workers had won. Indeed, they’d secured not only a voice on the job but fair and just wages. Following this, Giovannitti participated in the unsuccessful Patterson strike of the IWW and wrote for significant Left magazines in both English and Italian including the Masses and the International Socialist Review. He also created his own anti-war organ, Il Fuoco as World War One erupted. Giovannitti, long considered one of the Labor movement’s greatest orators, was expelled from the IWW in 1916 along with Ettor and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn due to their activities in a Minnesota iron-ore strike that IWW leaders did not agree with. (source: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAgiovannitti.htm).

Joe Hill (Joel Emmanuel Haaglund, aka Joseph Hillstrom, 1878-1915) was—and remains--the IWW’s guiding cultural force. A model for the fighting cultural worker, Hill wrote globally relevant, militant topical songs and biting parodies in support of the union cause and in the process, spawned a legend. Among his most famous pieces are “The Preacher and the Slave”, “Casey Jones, the Union Scab”, “There is Power in the Union”, “Mr. Block” and “Where the Fraser River Flows”, amidst a stream of others. He performed on piano, guitar and various other instruments, composing songs in bars and IWW halls at night, so that he would have them ready for union meetings, pickets and other functions the next day, spreading the word of this global industrial union through music. Hill came to the US from Sweden as a young man and saw firsthand the terrible conditions workers had to endure in the first part of the twentieth century; shortly thereafter he pledged allegiance to the cause of the IWW. He became a mythic character in all Left factions when he was silenced by the state of Utah via his infamous unjust execution. Famously, his last written statement was “Don’t mourn for me---organize”. Hill, for all the mythology that surrounds him, has been the subject of numerous biographical sketches; his life, and the frame-up which ended it, have been the viewed as a principal to the labor historians’ repertoire.

IWW members Dean Nolen and Fred Thompson’s detailed booklet offers considerable insight, even if some of it remains shrouded in the Joe Hill legends. While they cite that Hill’s first years in the United States were often a rather desperate attempt to find employment (he became something of a “wharf rat”), the first accounts of his cultural work date back to 1906. Hill was then living in San Francisco and chronicled the great earthquake for his hometown paper. Living in New York later, he worked as a porter by day and played piano in downtown saloons by night. But much more to the point,

The earliest parody written by Hill that we know of went to the hymn “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”, a Salvation Army favorite. It was already in circulation before it appeared in the 1911 edition of the IWW songbook (Nolan, Dean and Fred Thompson, Joe Hill: IWW Songwriter. Chicago General membership Branch, IWW, 1979, pp 4-5)

John Greenway’s American Folksongs of Protest tells of Hill’s first possible encounter with the Wobblies as well as his presentation of “The Preacher and the Slave” to the IWW:

One evening late in 1910 Joe Hill walked into the Portland, Oregon IWW hall with a song he had written to the tune of the popular Salvation Army gospel hymn, “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”. He gave it to the secretary of the local, George Reese, who handed it to Mac McClintock, the local’s “busker” or tramp entertainer. Mac sang it to the men idling in the hall, and the tremendous applause that greeted its rendition convinced Reese that they had something. He and McClintock revised the song, and printed it in their little song leaflet which two years later was adopted by the IWW as the official songbook of the union. Hill was invited to join the Wobblies, and so began his fabulous career. (Greenway, John, American Folksongs of Protest. NY: AS Barnes, 1953, page 185)

As has been written of many times over the years, Hill’s organizing efforts in the state of Utah were successful enough that the powers that converged on both government and business sought the need to stop him at all costs. Not long after, he was arrested on a murder charge that has always been contested by the IWW and a wealth of others. Eugene V. Debs, the nation’s most celebrated Socialist and radical of the 1910s, offered the highest praise to Hill during the time of the Wobbly’s imprisonment. He wrote in an article in the American Socialist:

Joe Hill is of a poetic temperament and is the author of songs of labor of genuine merit; he is of a tender, sympathetic and generous nature and utterly incapable of committing the crime charged against him (Debs, Eugene, The American Socialist, August 28, 1915; source: Foner, page 117)

The story of Joe Hill is best remembered as one of martyrdom. He’d survived red-baiting, police assaults and vicious Pinkerton detectives’ dubious means of strike-breaking. He lived to tell of dockyard fights, barroom brawls, and back-room precinct house beatings. But he was not able to survive the Utah court which found him guilty and sentenced him to death in 1915. While imprisoned, Hill wrote prolifically and toward the end offered what was arguably his most famous prose, which today is simply recalled as “Don’t mourn---organize!”

While Joe Hill continues to put a face on the concept of Wobbly cultural workers, he was by far not alone in his role. Significant numbers of itinerant musicians, poets, bards and visual artists functioned as IWW organizers, traveling to areas which contained oppressed workers, often immigrant or home-grown unskilled laborers, who could be moved to action via the arts in a most profound way. Ralph Chaplin (1887-1961) is recalled as one of the strongest cultural voices in the IWW, functioning as a writer and editor on several of their periodicals as well as offering visual artwork and music to many struggles. But Chaplin’s influences pre-date the IWW: as a boy he was a witness to the infamous Pullman Strike in Chicago and by his young adulthood was employed as an artist by the Charles H. Kerr publishing house, which released relevant early socialist books and also published the International Socialist Review, a guiding force for all progressive activists.

Chaplin’s activities with the IWW came early into the federation’s existence and he worked alongside such legendary figures as Mother Jones. His most important achievement, however, was his 1915 authorship of labor’s anthem, “Solidarity Forever”, written to the tune of “John Brown’s Body”, a theme of the Abolitionist movement. Over the years, Chaplin spoke of the struggle of the coal miners at a strike in a Kanawha Valley, West Virginia as the influence for his writing of this song. He was serving as editor of the union newspaper at the time, and he returned home returned home from the strike line one evening in January of 1915 and wrote the lyrics out to as he lay on his living room rug. The song was published immediately thereafter in the January 9 edition of Solidarity. This song continued to hold up as the primary anthem of labor and some of its more militant verses are heard only during the more radical gatherings, but in any event, it remains respected as the movement’s theme. He wrote of the song’s origins in Wobbly, an IWW organ:“I wanted a song to be full of revolutionary fervor and to have a chorus that was ringing and defiant” (source: Kornbluh, Joyce L., editor, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology. NY: Charles H. Kerr, 1998, page 26)

Additionally, Chaplin penned other Wobbly songs that have been well-remembered including “The Commonwealth of Toil” and “Paint ‘er Red”. The latter song became a vehicle for the forces of reaction in their fervor to neutralize the IWW and it was cited in numerous court documents during the World War 1 era prosecutions of the IWW.

Ironically, by the 1930s, Chaplin became a voice for the more conservative end of organized labor and he stood as an outspoken critic of the Congress of Industrial Organization’s Communist-associated unions, though these were usually on the cutting edge of workers’ rights and engaged, on a mass scale, in the same industrial organizing the IWW had pledged itself to since its founding. His turn against his Wobbly comrades has never been fully explained.

------

The Industrial Workers of the World suffered the brutal assault of the reactionary US government’s initial Red Scare, that which targeted anarchists as ‘foreign terrorists’ and subjected the IWW offices to continual ransackings, its members to constant oppression. By the end of the organization’s first decade, it had already experienced significant damage and during the First World War, Wobs needed to largely take their operation underground. By the end of the 1920s, this noble union had become a shadow of its former self. While the IWW has had points of invigoration over the decades, it was often ravaged by times of deprivation. But the anarchist core found new alliances within the street and campus uprisings of the 1960s and ‘70s and could boast such members as celebrated folksinger/activists Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk and especially Utah Phillips, who remained perhaps the most active Wobbly musician until his passing in 2008.

In the current day, the IWW stands as a dedicated force for social change, maintaining offices not only throughout the nation but internationally. In recent years, in the wake of the IWW’s centenary of 2005, increased attention has been brought to their struggle, such as the ongoing campaign to organize workers in Starbucks shops. Multiple accounts of compact disc collections have offered music dedicated to the cause and the publication of many new books on the Wobbly journey have brought it a newfound focus. As organized labor seeks to look into to its own radical heart, it cannot avoid the mission of these Industrial Workers, particularly when “Solidarity Forever” is next performed at a strike line or rally. These words of unity, this melody of rebellion, rings loud and true--now as then.

The noted journalist John Reed , a Wobbly in the 1910s before helping to found the Communist Party, wrote in a 1918 piece for the Liberator magazine of how the IWW was able to touch so many, so deeply. Here he offers perhaps the best possible description of the power of song within the Wobblies’ actions:

Let there be a “free speech fight” on in some town, and the “wobblies” converge upon it, across a thousand miles, and fill the jails with champions.

And singing. Remember, this is the only American working class movement which sings. Tremble then at the IWW, for a singing movement is not to be beaten...They love and revere their singers, too, in the IWW. All over the country workers are singing Joe Hill’s songs, “The Rebel Girl”, “Don’t Take May Papa Away From Me”, Workers of the World, Awaken”. Thousands can repeat his “Last Will”, the three simple verses written in his cell the night before execution. I have met working men carrying next their hearts, in the pockets of their working clothes, little boxes with some of Joe Hill’s ashes in them. Over Bill Haywood’s desk in national headquarters is a painted portrait of Joe Hill, very moving, done with love…I know no other group of Americans which so honors its singers…(Reed, John, “The IWW In Court”, The Education of John Reed. NY: International Publishers, 1955, pp 179-181. Originally entitled “The Social Revolution in Court”, The Liberator, September 1918)

About Me

John Pietaro, writer/musician/cultural organizer; Staff Writer, The NYC Jazz Record. Contributing Writer: Z Magazine, the Nation, CounterPunch, the Wire, many others. His latest book, ON THE CREATIVE FRONT: ESSAYS ON THE CULTURE OF LIBERATION, is under review for publication. Pietaro also wrote a chapter for the Harvey Pekar/Paul Buhle book SDS: A GRAPHIC HISTORY (2007 Hill &Wang). In 2013 he self-published a volume of contemporary proletarian fiction, NIGHT PEOPLE. Current projects: co-writing/editing the autobiography of Amina Baraka; authoring a novel. Founded NEW MASSES MEDIA in 2013, production/ publicity company. As a musician Pietaro performs on the NYC free jazz/new music circuit on hand drums, drumkit, vibraphone, percussion, voice. Over the years he has created music with Amina Baraka, Alan Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Karl Berger, Fred Ho, Ras Moshe, many more. Leader: the Red Microphone. Founder/producer, annual Dissident Arts Festival. Pietaro has spoken on arts activism at Left Forum, the Vision Festival and other venues. He is a member of the Author's Guild, PEN America, National Writers Union UAW 1981 and Jazz Journalists Association

NIGHT PEOPLE and Other Tales of Working NY

'THE RED MICROPHONE SPEAKS!' CD, 2013

"Revenge of the Atom Spies" (2007)

The Flames of Discontent: Laurie Towers & John Pietaro ..................SCROLL DOWN FOR an extensive 'PHOTO EXHIBIT' of cultural workers in history and a thorough list of 'RADICAL LINKS' !

'Little Red Song Book'

still fanning the flames

John Reed and Boardman Robinson, 1913

The revolutionary writer and political cartoonist in Europe

Edward Hopper

"Night on the El Train", 1918

Anti-War Dance

Anti-War Dance - WW1

Louis Fraina

Writer and early Communist movement leader was later purged from the CP in a haze of controversy. Currently all traces of him remain disappeared from official Party documents

William Gropper: "Revolutionary Age", July 1919

Organ of the Left-Wing of the SPUSA (roots of the CPUSA), edited by Louis Fraina

The Funeral of JOHN REED

1920--at the Kremlin Wall

'Metropolis'

Fritz Lang's powerful depiction of a futuristic society ruled by a lazy bourgeois totally dependent on the laboring of the workers in the depths of the city

'New Masses', 1928

Amazingly hip artwork by Louis Lozowick

Brecht in Leathers

Somehow encompasses all that was 30s Berlin and 70s New York all at the same time

The chilling art of Fred Ellis

from "The Daily Worker", 1931

Debs, with Max Eastman and Rose Pastor Stokes

The patron saint of the Socialist Party working closely with Communist Party cultural leaders--the arts can climb above the fray

'The Red Songbook'

compiled by members of the Composers Collective of NY, a CPUSA cultural organization

Langston Hughes

Eisler and Brecht

Composer Hanns Eisler and poet Bertolt Brecht, revolutionary artists

'Song of the United Front''

music by Hanns Eisler, lyric by Bertolt Brecht

Sid Hoff, 'The Daily Worker', 1930s

"Thank God he doesn't have to swim with the dirty masses in Coney Island"

Paul Robeson

performing for British strikers, 1930s

Stuart Davis

at work

'The Anvil'

Organ of the John Reed Club, 1934

The Rebel Song Book, 1935

Socialist Party cultural publication compiled by SP poet and journalist Samuel H. Friedman. In these fervant years Friedman almost singlehandedly led the Socialist arts program which included much live perforamnce, literature, lectures, gallery exhibits and even the radio station WEVD, named for Debs, which broadcast radio dramas, music and speeches.

The League of American Writers

1936 statement on the urgency of the Spanish Civil War by this powerfully united group of Left and liberal writers, coalesced through a CP initiaitive. The League was an an outgrowth of the American Writers Congress. As strong as this grouping was, its creation also sounded the death toll for the more radical John Reed Club, which was dissolved by Party leaders this same year.

'Waiting for Lefty', 1935

The Group Theatre's debut production of Odets immortal agit-prop play. Yes, that's a young Elia Kazan out in front shouting 'Strike! Strike!" decades before the crisis of conscience and career which saw him naming names in his second HUAC hearing. But wasn't this a time?

'Proletarin Literature in the United States'

1935, the first serious collection, edited by Granville Hicks and featuring the work of Mike Gold, Isidor Schneider, Joseph North, and other noted writers of the day

Artists Union

American Artists Congress, 1936

depicted by Stuart Davis

The Benny Goodman Quartet, 1937

Goodman's combo was revolutionary in that it was fully integrated in a time of terrible racism--further the Quartet laid down the ground work for all chamber jazz to come. The blurring solos of Lionel Hampton's vibraphone brought that instrument into the forefront as a major voice in jazz; Gene Krupa's drumming in this period also created a major role for percussionists in all aspects of this genre. Not to forget Teddy Wilson's brilliant piano playing and the clarinet of the leader!

Partisan Review editors, 1938

Phillip Rahv and Dwight McDonald and co.

'Native Son'

Richard Wright's groundbreaking novel, 1940

Disney Cartoonists Strike!

1941--the very radical cartoonists' union takes the studio by storm

Josh White, Leadbelly and friends

1940, NYC, BBC radio airshot

Leadbelly

"Bougeois Blues"

Carl Sandburg

He covered the march of Coxey's Army, became an early Socialist Party cultural worker and was still a beloved, celebrated elder of American folk culture!

John Howard Lawson, HUAC Hearing

speaking back to power

Hollywood on trial

The Ten included Herbert Biberman, screenwriter and director Ring Lardner Jr., screenwriter John Howard Lawson, screenwriter Edward Dmytryk, director Adrian Scott, producer and screenwriter Samuel Ornitz, screenwriter Lester Cole, screenwriter Albert Maltz, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter Alvah Bessie, screenwriter Also the great Charlie Chaplin left the U.S to fink work because he was blacklisted. Only 10% of the artists succeeded in rebuilding their careers.

Dalton Trumbo

HUAC hearing

Arthur Miller

HUAC vs the playwright

Paul Robeson, 1949

immediately after the Peekskill Riot

Ralph Ellison

'Invisible Man'

The Weavers

Lillian Hellman

Wonderfully atmospheric shot of the brilliant playwright who stared down HUAC

'Masses and Mainstream'

1953

'High Noon', 1952

Gary Cooper stars in the film by blacklisted writer Carl Foreman, a perfect allegory for the isolative stand of those who opposed HUAC and McCarthy

'Howl' by Allen Ginsberg

The militantly revolutionary Gay poet's groundbreaking work, 1956

Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee

the couple modeled the concept of the artist/activist with their brilliant acting abilities and consistent place on the front lines of the struggles for civil rights and labor unions

Beat Poets

In this 1959 photograph taken in New York City, composer/musician David Amram (top right) is seen with some of the artists, poets and writers who would become the leaders of "The Beat Generation." They include (clockwise from Amram): poet Allen Ginsburg, writer Gregory Corso (back to camera), artist Larry Rivers and author Jack Kerouac. Photo: John Cohen, Courtesy of david amram

En Route to Chicago, '68

Jean Genet, William Burrough, Alan Ginsberg--noted poet-activists who were also loud and proud Gay liberationists

'What's Going On?'

Marvin Gaye

The Last Poets

1968: the interplay of free verse poetry, improvisation and the politicis of race and revolution

'Ohio', 1970

CSNY's song offered chilling, driving commentary on the shootings at Kent State University

War Is Over!(if you want it)

A Christmas message from John and Yoko, Times Square, NYC, 1970

Bob Marley

"Get Up, Stand Up"

Samuel Friedman

The Socialist Party's cultural leader seen here in a 1977 pic with his wife. Friedman was a journalist and activist who, after the dissolution of the SP's arts efforts, became one of the Party's candidates for often on multiple occasion (photo by Steve Rossignol).

Peter Tosh

'Talking Revolution'

Rock Against Racism

here's the album collection which chronicled the 1976 and '78 British concerts established to fight the rising trend of neo-fascist skinhead gangs in the UK

Robert Mapplethorpe

This gifted, militantly Gay photogrpaher set off a firestorm of controversy in opposition to the neo-cons of the Reagan administration and the Edwin Meese "decency" doctrine.

Patti Smith

brazenly outspoken punk poet and activist, late 1970s

'Reds' 1982

Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton as John Reed and Louise Bryant, en route to Petrograd

ROCK AGAINST REAGAN

The Dead Kennedys headed up the bill for this protest concert, Washington DC, 1983

Nuyorican Poets Cafe

'Bedtime for Democracy'

Public Enemy

Karen Finley

The sexually provacative feminist performance artist did constant battle with the neo-cons of the 1980s and '90s and became a poster child for right-wing calls to suspend funding to the NEA

'Mumia 911'

This series of arts-actions occured in multiple spaces throughout NYC and other cities in an attempt to raise both funds and awareness for the cause of Mumia Abu-Jamal, journalist and Black Panther who was framed on a police murder charge in the lates '70s and continues to sit in death row now. For this event, NY's Brecht Forum hosted an all-day marathon on September 11, 1999, the house band of which was led by John Pietaro.

Pete Seeger, Music in the History of Struggle, 1999

with the Ray Korona Band, John Pietaro on percussion. 1199SEIU auditorium, NYC

Ani DiFranco

Fred Ho

The revolutionary saxophonist/composer has successfully forged an avant garde music which bridges improvisation and New Music composition w/ Marxism, Maoism and traditional Chinese folk art.

'Not in Our Name'

Charlie Haden reunites his revolutionary ensemble one more time to speak out against the Bush administration's manipulations of the populace, 2005.

The Brecht Forum

The Brecht Forum/NYC Marxist School came to be a fixture of Left education and culture in the early 1970s lasting through 2014.

New Masses Nights

Joe Hill

The Industrial Workers Band

Arturo Giovannitti, around 1912

brilliant IWW poet/organizer who composed epic pieces about his imprisonment and the struggle for a more equitable society

Ralph Chaplin

IWW songwriter and journalist who penned "Solidarity Forever" in 1911

John Reed at his desk

note the Provincetown Playhouse poster!

Robert Minor, 'The Masses'

July 1916

Louise Bryant

Crusading journalist seen here approx 1918

Max Eastman

writer, activist, editor of 'The Masses'

Isadora Duncan

Modern Dance in revolution

Robert Minor

The radical artist and leading CPUSA functionary

Michael Gold

Cultural conscience of 'the Daily Worker', 'New Masses' and acclaimed proletarian novelist seen here addresseing a May Day crowd on the streets of Manhattan, early 1930s.

"Costume Ball--Where All Toilers Meet!"

The Daily Worker, January 14, 1928

VJ Jerome

Communist Party cultural commissar

NYC, 1931: A delegation of the John Reed Club following a trip to Harlan County, VA

John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Sam Ornitz

'The Crisis'

1933, radical magazine of Black American militancy

Marc Blitzstein

member of the Composers Collective of New York

'Negro Songs of Protest'

Compiled by Lawrence Gellert, illustrations by his brother the great Communist artist Hugo Gellert. The songs were arranged by Ellie Siegmeister of the Composers Collective of NY

'The Workers Song book, Workers Music League, 1934

compiled by the Composers Collective of New York

American Artists' Congress

Signed by AAC Secretary STUART DAVIS

Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera

"Class Struggle"

Diego Rivera's amazing work told the story of the workers' fight against capitalist exploitation --and was created as a commision for Rockefeller Center's main hall. It was not long before John D had the piece destroyed.

'Processional', 1937

modernist drama by John Howard Lawson, a leader of CPUSA cultural activists

The Almanac Singers, 1941

THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS

Woody

Silent speak-back to HUAC

George Orwell

the British writer maintained his democratic socialist views through his great novels

Earl Robinson, ca 1940s

member of the Composers Collective of New York, leader of the American People's Chorus and a musician of the people throughout his career. Among his compositions was "Joe Hill", "The House I Live in", "Ballad for Americans" and "Black and White"

Hanns Eisler, HUAC hearing, 1947

Trumbo and Lawson

Paul Robeson at Peekskill

Flanked by unionist and Communist guards, staring down the fascist mobs at Peekskill NY, 1949

Sinclair Lewis

'It Can't Happen Here'

Dashiell Hammet

closing out the HUAC onslaught

'Salt of the Earth'

Paul Robeson shouts down HUAC

"You are the Un-Americans--and you should be ashamed of yourselves!"

W.E.B. DuBois

Stockholm Peace Conference, 1955

'Rebel Poets of America', 1957 LP

Kenneth Patchen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Amiri Baraka

"We Insist!--Freedom Now Suite"

Max Roach with Abbey Lincoln

Lorraine Hansberry

Peter, Paul and Mary

1963 March on Washington

'Spartacus', 1964

The tale of a unified slave revolt was first written by Howard Fast in novel form and then realized for the screen by Dalton Trumbo

Bill Dixon's OCTOBER REVOLUTION IN JAZZ, 1964

John Coltrane

Seen here performing his powerful piece, "Alabama" on German television, 1965. The story of the church bombing which killed four African American girls and injured others was retold in this mournful work.

The Fugs

Radical Greenwich Village poets turn rock-n-rollers of a whole other sort, 1965

Freedom Marching

James Baldwin, Joan Baez, and James Forman (left to right) enter Montgomery, Alabama on the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights, 1965.

You Can't Jail the Revolution

Shades of Chicago, '68

Sam Rivers

The great jazz musician who helped to found the avant garde loft scene in the 1960s was devoutly outspoken with regard to radical politics and the incorporation of same into his music. He is seen here performing at his own NYC space, Studio Rivbea. From the look of that tom-tom to the left, the drummer is Milford Graves who not only broke new ground into improvisational music but its part in Black liberation and other revolutionary struggles.

Henry Cow, late '60s

British avant rock band also engaged in social statements and celebrated the music of Brecht & Eisler

Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra

1969: Bassist extraordinaire Haden (right) unites with pianist-arranger Carla Bley (left), trumpeter Don Cherry (kneeling) and a wealth of others to create a radical album of anti-war music. Included in the collection was a powerful reconfiguring of Brecht and Eisler's Song of the United Front

Gil Scott Heron

"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"

MC 5

Kicking out the jam as well as the walls of conformity

Rally for John Sinclair

this fund- and awareness-raising event was in honor of the noted anti-war activist who'd been arrested on trumped-up drug charges. It featured John and Yoko, Alan Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Archie Shepp, Commander Cody and a host of others

Art Ensemble of Chicago

Revolutionary composition/improvisation: "a great Black music"

Victor Jara

The great Chilean revolutionary songwriter

TILLIE OLSEN w/MAYA ANGELOU

Writers March Against Apartheid, 1970s

Frederic Rzewski

In 1975 the composer created "THE PEOPLE UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED", inspired by the struggles of farm workers and militants around the globe

Richard Hell

Nihilistic poet of punk performing with the Voidoids at CBGB

ABC No Rio

activist performance space, NY's Lower East Side

'London Calling'

The Clash

Fela Kuti

Revolution in song from Nigeria

'Bonzo Goes to Bitburg', 1985

The Ramones satiric commentary on Reagan's visit to the Nazi soldiers cemetary

'Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing'

Artist Space, NYC, 1989: reactionaries tried at all costs to shut down this boldly outspoken exhibit on AIDS

Day Without Art

Visual AIDS and other arts activist organizations created a Day Without Art to commemorate World AIDS Day

Tupac Shakur

Militant Hip Hop 101

'Somebody Blew Up America'

Amiri Baraka, fearlessly taking on the controversial causes of the 9/11 attacks

Robeson

After falling victim to a nation which tried to disappear him, Paul Robeson is honored with his own stamp

The first Dissident Fest: The Dissident Folk Festival 2006

This event featured Malachy McCourt, Pete Seeger, Bev Grant, Lack and a bevy of radical jazz musicians, poets and more